Happy Saturday lovely readers! I’m sorry there was no post on Wednesday, my laptop decided to die on me but it’s all fixed now, yay! So today I’m going to be talking about social anxiety again, if you read my post on living with social anxiety you’ll know I have suffered with it for most of my life. I realise my last post on the issue was very serious (which is necessary sometimes) but today I’m going to be tackling the issue a bit more light heartedly. These are moments that those who suffer with social anxiety will recognise and relate to.

1. The stomach sinking feeling when a friend you have planned to meet up with brings someone you don’t know along. Cue severe panic trying to think of both what to say and do.

2. You’ve finally built up the courage to speak to someone, you’ve practiced what you are going to say dozens of times in your head. You open your mouth to speak and it comes out in a jumbled rushed shout, resulting in terrified looks all round.

3. “Get into groups and prepare a presentation to give to the rest of the class”. When this phrase is uttered by a teacher/ lecturer and you are hit by a wave of nausea and an overwhelming desire to flee the room.

4. Being proud of yourself for managing to go to class or shopping but not being able to share your pride as other people think these things are just “normal”.

5. You’ve managed to go shopping alone but when you finally get to the front of the queue and the cashier starts speaking you forget how to interact with another human being. So instead stand there silently and rigidly while the cashier looks at you like you’re insane.

6. When your phone starts to ring and there is no one around to answer it for you. So you place a pillow over it until the bad noise goes away.

7. Someone tries to strike a conversation with you but your fear means you can only give very quite one word answers. Resulting in the other person thinking you are a freak. Or rude. Or both.

8. When your friend/ relative doesn’t understand your problems and thinks you’re “just a bit shy” and tries to force you to socialise.

I hope you enjoyed this post, I don’t want to offend anyone with this lighter approach to social anxiety but sometimes it’s better to add a bit of humour to life. Let me know what you thought of this post with a comment.